


The Boy in the Garden

by Scrawlers



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: (or at least a direct follow-up since it takes place the next day), Gen, Pre-Canon, Sequel to my fic Genesis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 16:07:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11256375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrawlers/pseuds/Scrawlers
Summary: When Sophie arrives at the lab one morning, she finds a five-year-old boy in the garden.





	The Boy in the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> This is an immediate follow-up to my fic "Genesis", which is an origin story I wrote for Alan in which Professor Sycamore finds and unofficially adopts him. You don't necessarily have to read that one to understand this one, though it is strongly recommended that you do since this fic immediately follows this one (as in, it takes place the very next day), and several references are made to it as a result. In this fic, Sophie is about eighteen, and has recently started working for Sycamore as a part-time assistant while she finishes up school. Sycamore is twenty-five, and Alan is five as stated in the summary.

If the days in a month could be organized like a Bingo chart, then Sundays were always free spaces.  Sophie didn’t have any classes on Sundays, and Professor Sycamore never required her assistance at the lab then, either.  She could drop by, of course—he told her she was always welcome to come by and assist with research—but Sundays were her days, to do with as she pleased.  She could sleep in, have a nice brunch at her favorite breakfast place on Autumnal Avenue, and maybe even go for a swim late in the afternoon.  If it was a Sunday, she could do all of that and more.

That particular Sunday morning, however, had her fishing the key to the Lumiose City Laboratory out of her purse with one hand as she clutched a to-go cup of tea in her other, a yawn caught in her throat.  Sundays were her days, and in all honesty she didn’t usually like to spend them working, but Professor Sycamore had left to go investigate a houndour raid in a village off Route 10 on Tuesday morning, and as far as Sophie knew he wasn’t back yet.  He had said he would call her when he returned, after all, and he hadn’t.  She had checked her phone an extra three times just that morning to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.  With Professor Sycamore gone, someone needed to check on the pokémon and make sure they were all right, and though Sophie knew that Professor Sycamore wouldn’t require that of her on her day off (he was always very adamant that days off were important, even if she wasn’t sure when he followed his own advice), she felt that the person to check on them should be her regardless.

But as much as she had counted on the day being exactly like the past five before it, her first clue that something was off was when her key slotted too easily into the lock, meeting no resistance as she turned it to unlock the door.  Sophie had locked the door when she had left yesterday afternoon, she thought.  She was conscientious about that, had been ever since a stranger had waltzed into her family’s home when she was seven because her older sister had forgotten to lock the door behind them when they came in from playing.  But the door was unlocked now, all but inviting anyone to walk in off the street, and Sophie gnawed on her bottom lip.  Had she forgotten?  Had she been so looking forward to a potential day off the next day that she had left the lab unlocked all night?  She couldn’t see herself doing that, but—

She gave her head a little shake, and took a slow breath in through her nose.  There was no use worrying about it now.  If she _had_ left the door unlocked all night, then she would just have to do a run-through of the lab to make sure nothing was stolen and no pokémon were hurt.  Hopefully everything was as it should be, and Professor Sycamore . . . well, she would end up telling him.  She was sure she would end up telling him.  She was no good at lying or keeping secrets.  Thankfully, he had always been nice, and so she was sure that he wouldn’t be _too_ angry, especially if nothing had been stolen and no one had been hurt.  Sophie could only hope.

The lab was quiet when she entered and shut the door behind her, and it wasn’t until she had slung the strap of her post on one of the prongs of the coat rack that she heard what sounded like the door to the garden sliding open.  She went shock-still, her heart jolting in her chest.  If Professor Sycamore hadn’t yet returned from his expedition (and she checked her phone again right then to make sure, but she still had no new or missed messages), then that meant someone _else_ had to be opening the door to the garden, which meant that someone else was in the lab.  Someone else had entered because _she_ had left the door unlocked, and now they were doing who-knew-what to the pokémon in the garden.  Sophie bit back an unhappy whine as she rummaged in her purse for her meowstic’s pokéball.  She wasn’t the best battler in the world, and to be entirely honest she didn’t particularly _enjoy_ battling (she much, much preferred to curl up with a good book, warm cup of tea, and her meowstic purring on her lap), but if there was an intruder in the lab because of her mistake, then it was up to her to get them out.  Part-time assistant or not, it was her job to set things right.

Sophie carefully made her way through the halls into the kitchen, and tried to ignore how her heart sank when she saw that the door to the garden was indeed wide open.  On the one hand, she supposed, maybe that was a good sign.  Whoever had broken in hadn’t seen fit to cover their tracks.  If they were careless, maybe they would also be easily sent packing.  If nothing else, maybe one good Confusion from her meowstic would be enough to send them running.  With that thought bolstering her, she held her meowstic’s pokéball in a white-knuckled grip as she crossed the kitchen (setting her cup of tea on the kitchen table as she did so) and reached the threshold of the door to the garden—

And froze when her eyes fell on the intruder.

He was a boy—a little boy, at that.  A small child, maybe even younger than seven.  He had squatted down in the grass, his hands on his knees as he peered at a zigzagoon right in front of him, the zigzagoon peering up at him just as curiously, its little nose wiggling as it sniffed him.  The boy’s hair was jet black and messy, sticking up every which way in a perfect example of bedhead, and he was dressed in simple jeans and a white, long-sleeved shirt that looked a bit big on him.  His feet were bare, his toes curling over the grass, and as she watched, he slowly picked one hand up off his knee to cautiously reach out to the zigzagoon instead.

The sigh of relief Sophie had nearly let escape her when she saw that the intruder was just a child caught in her chest.  All of the pokémon at the lab were friendly, but he was still a stranger, and a child, and children needed to be careful around unfamiliar pokémon—

“Don’t,” she said, a little more loudly than she had intended, and she extended her own hand as if to stop him.  

The boy jumped as if she had poked him with a cattle prod, and whipped around to face her, his eyes big and blue and fearful.  The zigzagoon, too, started at the boy’s sudden movement, skittering back a couple of feet.  The boy glanced over at the zigzagoon, but his glance lasted only a second before he looked back at Sophie.  He was seated on the grass now, not moving as he stared at her, and Sophie felt a pang of guilt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she smiled a little to ease his fear and show she meant it as she slipped her meowstic’s pokéball into the pocket of her lab coat.  He didn’t move.  “I didn’t mean to scare you, it’s just—you should be careful around pokémon you don’t know.  The pokémon here are nice, but even nice pokémon can sometimes get scared and bite.  I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

Still the boy said nothing.  He didn’t move from his spot save to bring his knees back up to his chest, staring at her from over them and under his dark fringe.  But when Sophie stepped over the threshold into the garden, his eyes widened again and he scrambled to his feet, taking a couple steps back.

“Oh—it’s okay, it’s okay,” Sophie said, and she lifted her hands in a placating gesture.  The boy averted his eyes, staring down at the grass, his hands curled into tiny fists around the hem of his shirt.  Sophie thought it would have been cute if he didn’t look so scared.  “I just wanted to . . . um, what’s your name?  What are you doing here?”

If he hadn’t felt inclined to answer anything she had said to him before that, Sophie didn’t know why she thought he would answer now, and true to form, he didn’t.  Instead, he chewed the inside of his cheek as he stared at the grass, shifting his weight from foot to foot.  He wrapped his arms around his stomach, and Sophie thought that perhaps she should try to corral him back into the lab—but when she took another step toward him, he took another step back.

“Okay,” Sophie said, in the gentlest voice she could, “it’s okay, everything’s okay.  We just need to go inside, okay?  And then maybe call your parents.  Do you know their phone number?”  The boy didn’t answer, even to nod or shake his head, and Sophie closed her eyes briefly before she switched tracks.  “Okay, then maybe you can show me where you live?  I can walk you home.”  

No answer, still, and now he was biting his cheek so hard Sophie thought it looked like he was about to start crying, and that was the last thing she wanted.  It wasn’t that she minded when children cried, per se—she didn’t like to see them upset, but Sophie liked to think she was relatively soothing with them when they were—but more that, in a list of things that had apparently gone wrong when she had forgotten to lock the door, having the intruder be an upset child who grew more upset with each passing second because everything she did was wrong was . . . well, this was the biggest problem on the list at present.

“Please, let’s just—” Sophie said, and she took another step closer only for the boy to take another step back, and stumbled as his foot hit a rock in the yard.  Sophie winced.  “Let’s just go inside,” Sophie said, and she couldn’t help the plea in her voice.  “We can figure out what to do once we’re inside, but—” She took another step forward, he took another step back, and she said, “I’m just trying to _help_ —”

“Sophie?”

_Oh no._

Sophie turned at the sound of Professor Sycamore’s voice to see him standing in the doorway to the garden, and before she could say anything the child she had been attempting to coax inside bolted past her.  Sophie started to call out to him (and tried and failed to catch him as he ran past—children were like little zigzagoon themselves, sometimes!), but before she could say more than  _“hey”_ he had reached Professor Sycamore, and swiftly wove around him to hide behind Professor Sycamore’s legs.

That, Sophie had to say, was unexpected.  She also wasn’t sure in the slightest how she was supposed to explain it to her boss.

“Um, hi,” she said, as Professor Sycamore looked down at the little boy using him as a shield and clutching his lab coat.  Her voice cracked embarrassingly, but she forced herself to carry on.  “Welcome back.  I can explain.” 

“Can you?” Professor Sycamore said, but he sounded bemused rather than angry.  He reached down to ruffle the hair of the boy clinging to him, and smiled as he said, “Good morning, Alan.  Sorry I woke up late.  Have you been up for long?”

The boy shook his head, and Sophie felt her mouth drop open a little as Professor Sycamore’s smile grew. 

“Good!  I’m glad for that, at least,” Professor Sycamore said.  “Well, it seems you found the garden, although I’m guessing you haven’t found any breakfast yet.  What say we throw something together for breakfast before we start the day?”  The boy mumbled something Sophie didn’t catch, and Professor Sycamore sighed a little.  “I know, I know—but breakfast is important.  You remember what Fulbert said, don’t you?  Even he said that you should start eating breakfast, because it’s important.  It’s one of the very few things he has been right about in a while, so it’s probably a good idea to listen.”

“Um,” Sophie said again, for lack of anything else to say.  It felt as if her brain had stalled, like she had tried to download an entire PC operating system on a word processor.

But that was enough to turn Professor Sycamore’s attention back to her, and he laughed a bit sheepishly.  “Yes, sorry—I was supposed to call you when I returned, wasn’t I?  My apologies, Sophie.  We got in last night, but with everything that had happened and the trip and all, calling you to let you know slipped my mind entirely.  I’m sorry to make you come all the way out here today, especially since it’s your day off.”

“That’s . . . that’s all right, but . . .” Sophie looked back down at the little boy, who had been staring at her again, though he quickly averted his eyes when he saw her looking at him. “We?”

“Oh!  Yes.”  Professor Sycamore stepped to the side to give Sophie a better view of the child standing before him, and though the boy moved as if to cling to Professor Sycamore’s coat again, he seemed to think better of it in the same second and remained where he was.  “Sophie, this is Alan.  I found him in the mountains during my trip.  Alan, this is Sophie.  She works part-time here at the lab as my assistant.”

Silence, save for the chirping of the fletchling in the trees, reigned over the garden for a long moment.  When Sophie found her voice again, she asked, “You . . . found him?  Like, you . . . just . . . you just . . . found him, and picked him up, and brought him home?”

“More or less,” Professor Sycamore said, and he shrugged.  “There was a bit more to it than that, but that is a pretty succinct summary of what happened.”

“O-Oh.”  Sophie looked back at the child—at Alan—as he stared at the grass and scuffed his toes along it.  She hesitated for only a moment before she said, “And Professor Fulbert . . . he went with you, didn’t he?  He let you do this?”

Professor Sycamore huffed, and sounded a touch annoyed as he said, “Fulbert didn’t _let_ me do anything, nor does he ever.  This was my decision, not his.  Alan is going to be staying here as my assistant from now on.” 

Sophie’s eyes widened.  “Permanently?”

“Well—”

“What about his parents?”  Even as the words left her mouth, Sophie’s voice trailed off.  She had been too shocked by the fact that Professor Sycamore apparently already knew Alan before to notice, but now that she looked at them, she noticed that they had the same color hair.  Their eyes weren’t the exact same shade of blue, but they were near enough.  And for Professor Sycamore to decide to simply bring a child home out of the blue like that . . . “Are you—?”

“No, no, no,” Professor Sycamore said, a note of hasty laughter in his voice.  “It’s nothing like that.  I’m only taking care of him.  Like I said, I found him in the mountains.  He’s an orphan, and I felt it would be best for me to take him in given the circumstances.  That’s all.”

“Oh,” Sophie said again.  

Alan was as quiet as ever, still staring at the grass, and as bewildered as she still felt by the fact that Professor Sycamore had gone to check on a houndour pack and had returned with a small child, it seemed as if his mind was pretty set on the decision, that he knew what he was doing, and that—for the time being, at least, and possibly forever if Professor Sycamore intended on adopting him—Alan was going to be staying there at the lab.  The misunderstanding she had over Alan being an intruder (and the unlocked door, because if Professor Sycamore had returned the previous night it meant _he_ was the reason the door was unlocked) aside, Alan didn’t seem to be a troublesome child, and so while having a small child running around the lab would certainly change things, Sophie thought that it probably wouldn’t really be a bad thing.  She smiled, and placed her hands on her knees to lean forward and try to look at him on eye level.

“It’s nice to meet you, Alan,” she said, and she smiled.  “Like Professor Sycamore said, my name is Sophie.  I hope we can be friends.” 

Alan glanced briefly at her, his eyes darting up to read her face for only a second before he looked away again.  He didn’t smile, and Sophie felt her own fall.

“He’s a little bit shy,” Professor Sycamore said, and Sophie thought that ‘a little bit’ was an understatement.  “He hasn’t exactly had the best experiences with people.  Please don’t take it personally; I’m sure he’ll warm up to you in time.” 

Sophie stood up straight again, and smiled as best she could.  “It’s okay.  There’s nothing wrong with being shy.  He can take all the time he needs.”

Professor Sycamore beamed at her.  “Marvelous.  Thank you, Sophie.  Although, on that note—”

“What is it?”

“Well—I hate to ask this of you, given that it _is_ your day off today, but . . . well, I was actually hoping to take Alan out to do a bit of shopping today.  Get him some better clothes, that sort of thing.  Would you mind taking care of things here while we do that?”  Before Sophie could respond, Professor Sycamore continued quickly, “We won’t be very long, I promise.  I would just prefer to take him out earlier rather than later, when the crowds aren’t likely to be as big.”

Sophie nodded.  “No, it’s okay, I don’t mind.  I was planning on working today anyway, so it really doesn’t change my plans at all.”

Professor Sycamore smiled in relief.  “Once again, thank you, Sophie.  You are a life-saver.”

“I do my best,” Sophie said, grinning.  “Oh, but—if you’re taking him clothes shopping, you should take him by Boutique Couture!  I know it’s expensive, but they just added a new line for children that is just precious—”

Professor Sycamore’s smile didn’t fade, but when he laughed, it sounded a little awkward for reasons Sophie couldn’t place.  “Yes, well—we’ll see,” he said, and he ruffled Alan’s hair again.  “That said, breakfast is in order first, and then we can head out.  Sophie, have you eaten yet?  Would you care to join us?”

“Thank you for the offer, but I had a muffin on the way here,” she said. 

Professor Sycamore nodded, and then looked down at Alan, who looked up to meet his eyes.  “See, Alan?” Professor Sycamore said.  “Sophie ate breakfast, too.  Breakfast is good.  Everyone should eat breakfast.”

Alan sighed and looked away, and this time Sophie thought she heard him mumble something that sounded like, “not hungry” as he did.

Professor Sycamore shook his head, and then gently nudged Alan back toward the lab door.  “Well, we’ll work on that,” he said.  He looked back at Sophie and flashed another grateful smile as he said, “Once again, thank you, Sophie.  I will make sure you have some overtime added to your check for this.”

“That isn’t necessary, but it is appreciated,” Sophie said.  “I’ll just get started out here.  Please let me know if you need anything, Professor.”

“Likewise,” Professor Sycamore said, and he turned to follow Alan back into the lab.

It wasn’t even nine a.m. yet, but Sophie was pretty sure that this was already the most eventful morning she had experienced in a long while.  Still, as headed further out into the yard to start morning check-ups for the pokémon that lived at the lab, she could at least say that it wasn’t the bad sort of eventful.  The opposite, really, even if Professor Sycamore’s newest assistant was more skittish than a baby absol.  She trusted Professor Sycamore when he said that Alan would adjust, and if nothing else, she would do her best to show Alan that he had no reason to be afraid of her.  Even if it took time, she was sure she could get him to see that. 


End file.
